


So They Tremble

by theLiterator



Series: so they tremble [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst, F/M, Genderswap, Hurt/Comfort, Misunderstandings, Tony Feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-08
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-20 14:17:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/586279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, it doesn't matter how many soft science degrees Tony collected during her rebellious teenaged European Years, or how dead she thinks her past villains are; she's always Pavlov's bitch.</p><p>A fic in which Steve is a bastard (but doesn't know it), Tony is badass (but a little traumatized) and nothing goes right for anyone, not even Obadiah Stane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Even Tony Stark can't rules-lawyer Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation

Honestly, Tony was of the firm opinion that she shouldn’t know so intimately what freefall felt like.

She knew it so intimately, in fact, that she could even point out the different types; for instance, she was currently experiencing the second-worst type, also known as “Oh God oh God I’m gonna die (while in suit)”. The worst type was the same only without the suit.

JARVIS was silent in her ears, and the HUD was blank. The only reason she knew she was falling was the sensation of motion. Another bad indicator, as it meant even core systems such as inertial dampeners were offline.

She screamed, which was stupid, because no one could hear her and if inertial dampeners were offline, so were the air cyclers, but it was as it always was in these life-or-death moments-- there were two Tonys. One who could calculate the variables, and one who was filled with fight-or-flight instinct and screaming terror.

That bitch could just fuck off, thank you very much, because she should be hitting the ground in about…

\---


	2. You see, Steve has A Thing for competent women

“Iron Man is down. Repeat: Iron Man is _down_. Shit, I’m officially the only one allowed to jump recklessly off of buildings, okay? I have grappler attachments. Why doesn’t-- shit, motherfucking--“

A car exploded just to Steve’s left, and he flinched away from the stench of burning plastic for a second, then he ducked around a lamppost as the drone-thing that had exploded it went for Steve again. He was running out of things to hide behind.

“Copy that, Hawkeye,” Steve said grimly. They were not doing well, and without aerial support ‘not well’ was going to tilt heavily towards ‘dead’.

“No, you do _not_ copy, Cap! He’s being trucked away.”

“What? Repeat last transmission, over.” Coulson, as always, observing proper transmission protocol, even when Steve was starting to let it slide.

It’s not like their tiny team really needed it, after all. A soft zzzt noise presaged two drone-things collapsing, and he caught a glimpse of scarlet hair between them. He took the barest moment to admire her competence before he had to roll away from a gasping hand-like attachment. He’d already been caught on the shoulder once, and he could still feel blood pouring from that wound, which meant it had cut deep.

(Ignore the pain.)

“You heard me,” and Steve had never heard Hawkeye so serious. “Not like there was much to truck away.”

“What?” Steve bit out the query in the half-second between throwing his shield and ducking a laser beam. Lasers should be outlawed.

“You ever drop an egg?”

Steve didn’t answer that, and the whole battlefield went quiet. He absently reached out to catch his shield on the rebound.

“I’m in pursuit, by the way. In case anyone was wondering.”

“Belay that, Hawkeye,” Steve snapped. “Regroup. We need--“

Except they didn’t. The drone-things were all collapsing, and Steve felt his hackles rise.

“Who’s taking bets that they were after Iron Man?” Black Widow murmured after she appeared at Steve's side, her voice an awkwardly delayed stereo with the radio in his ear.

“I don’t bet on sure things,” Steve said absently, blinking his eyes and trying to get the image of cracked eggs on cement out of his mind.

He was getting to be close friends with Iron Man, and he wasn’t sure how he would tell Miss Stark that he’d gotten him kidnapped. Especially since Miss Stark was, as Hawkeye liked to put it, a cold, cagey bitch.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit--“

“Sitrep, Hawkeye,” Black Widow said, and her voice was like warm velvet. Steve wished the blood loss wasn’t making him so woozy that he was focusing on the little puppy-crush he had on his teammate and not… well…

Iron Man.

“The truck went into one of the Stark facilities and disappeared.”

“So? That’s good, right?” Bruce was back. That was good. Steve cast a weather eye over the scene, contemplating cleanup. “Faraday cage!” Bruce shouted at the clustered team of SHIELD agents who were gesturing at the collapsed drone things.

“I don’t think so,” Hawkeye said. “Since this is one of the weapons sites. And it’s looking pretty active for a disused weapons factory.”

“You have got to be kidding me!” Steve snapped. And, he’d never say it aloud, but he mentally tacked on ‘that liar!’

He was pretty sure everyone else was thinking it too.

He should probably be a little more gracious; it wasn’t like he particularly cared whether Miss Stark was manufacturing weapons or not. After all, her father had been a very good friend of Steve’s when he hadn’t seemed to have many friends at all, and he’d only known Howard because of his weapons manufacturing contract with the military. The problem was how completely self-righteous she was about it.

If someone even _hinted_ at what she termed her “sordid past” (which didn’t even encompass her promiscuity and alcoholism. That was her “libertine present”, as she’d so bluntly informed him, with a challenging gleam to her eye, pressing right into his personal space so he could smell her expensive perfume.) she’d straighten up her spine and snap out that she was no longer in that business, but she’d be happy to suck whomever’s cock, if that was needed.

It wasn’t really any wonder that he avoided her company like the plague, was it?

“Yep. Willing to bet that whoever’s got Iron Man isn’t really down with Tony’s regime.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Steve said. “Let’s regroup. We need to talk to Miss Stark.”

Black Widow was suddenly seized of a coughing fit, and Steve took advantage of the opportunity to pat her back and offer her his arm on the way to the car. The stench of burning things was really not conducive to any sort of meeting, so he opened the door for her and once they were safely ensconced within, Bruce clambering in immediately after Steve, he tapped on the glass.

It rolled down, and Steve leaned forward to ask Happy Hogan if there was a safe place for them to regroup.

“’Course,” Happy said easily. “You probably won’t like it though, won Architectural Digest’s home of the year two years ago. Pepper was real pleased.”

Steve bit back a grimace, and nodded. “Hawkeye, location?”

He relayed Hawkeye’s response so Happy could collect him on the way, and very properly averted his eyes while Black Widow took advantage of the opportunity to turn back into Natasha Romanov.

He was a little jealous, really. There wasn’t nearly enough room in the car to get out of his own costume.

Hawkeye looked grim when they collected him, and Natasha took his hand in her own. Steve could feel his cheeks coloring, and he tugged awkwardly on his cowl, hoping they wouldn’t notice.

“So we need a preliminary plan,” he said after a few moments.

“If we can get ahold of Tony, she might have a way of tracking the armor if they move Iron Man again,” Bruce said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t…” Steve began, but Natasha gave him a quelling stare and he trailed off uncertainly.

“First priority is recovering Iron Man. Secondary objective can be calling a witch hunt on Tony. In case you’ve forgotten, she’s funding this whole operation and then some. Unless you want to return to SHIELD rosters and SHIELD quarters, Steve, you’re going to have to let her be.”

Steve shook his head, but he was a terrible liar, even to himself, so he didn’t try to protest.

“I just wish I understood why Iron Man trusted her so much. Maybe if I knew--“

“Cap, come on, how about I pull up a map of the facility and we get a basic recon plan?” Hawkeye was looking warily between him and Bruce, so he let it go.

By the time they made it to Miss Stark’s LA home, they had a rough plan of attack, and all they needed now was a place to bandage up their wounds and perhaps a chance to talk to Miss Stark herself to see what she could contribute.

They opened the front door to JARVIS’s soothingly familiar greeting, and …

A disaster.

“Did they look for him here, first?” Steve asked, but Natasha was shaking her head while picking her way over the debris, apparently heading for a glowing touchpad near some stairs.

“Nah, this damage is old, see?” Bruce said, pointing at the dust-covered remnants of a vase.

“Huh,” was all Steve could say. He saw a different set of stairs, spiraling behind what had once been a glass enclosure, and he headed toward them.

They led into a workshop that was, if possible, even worse off than the first floor. Steve turned around twice, slowly examining the room, before he saw one of Howard’s prototypes of his shield under some sort of tubing.

He strode over, but once he got to it, he didn’t know what he had intended on doing. He touched the shield lightly, and looked around again.

Some suits were in glass display cases along one wall, but they looked clunky and boxy and out-dated even to him, so that he wondered how long this room had sat here, destroyed and abandoned.

A film reel was set up with a projector and a screen on the far wall, and as tempted as he was to go investigate that anachronism, he made himself face the computer instead.

“JARVIS?” he asked.

“Yes, Captain Rogers?”

“Can you call Miss Stark for me, please? Tell her it’s urgent.”

He sat down at the computer. She often pulled up video access, and it would be rude to be unprepared. Plus, she would likely call him a technophobe again, and he wasn’t, really. She just never seemed to catch him on a good day.

After a few moments, JARVIS said “There was no response, sir. Shall I try Ms. Potts?”

“No, thank you,” Steve said. “But if you could send Miss Stark a message telling her where we are and that we need to get ahold of her, that would be nice.”

“Of course, sir.”

Steve spun the chair around lazily, noting the broken cars and the whole ones and thinking that the whole room seemed so lonely.

No wonder Miss Stark didn’t come around here. She was a woman who was rarely lonely, if her trailing posse of well-paid sycophants and would-be lovers were any indication.

He decided, perversely, that he rather liked this workshop. It was much better than the gleaming glass-and-chrome labs that she and Bruce seemed to favor in New York.

The Avengers upstairs started calling his name and he sighed before standing up. His hand knocked against some sort of device with a dull glow to it and an interesting pattern to its circular top. Iron Man would be able to tell him what it was when they got him back, he decided.

Once more unto the breach.


	3. Tony Stark has been firing weapons longer than you have

Tony woke in pain and instantly decided that she hadn’t been unconscious _nearly_ long enough.

She tried to roll over, to curl up and protect her hurts, but she was restrained, and that made her open her eyes.

She wasn’t in the suit. She should be in the suit. Immediately she cast around for signs of familiar faces, dreading Steve’s presence and hoping for it at the same time, (Iron Man had heard too many of his confidences and Miss Stark had endured too much of his ire for her to disclose the truth, oh, say, ever, but his presence would mean friendlies, not hostiles, and how she loathed waking up with hostiles. It was, after all, the stuff of her worst nightmares.)

“Tony, Tony, Tony,” she heard, and God, was that voice straight out of said nightmares or what?

“So, still unconscious after all,” she murmured aloud. Her head hurt like a motherfucker, and she felt like an enormous bruise all over.

“Not at all, sweetheart,” the voice said, and she flinched at the endearment.

“God,” she whispered.

“Wrong again,” and then _he_ was in her field of vision again, smelling of Old Spice and metal and cloying, awful familiarity, and all she could say in response to that was:

“Wasn’t talking to you, motherfucker.”

“And she liked it too, you know. Wish the old adage held true, but in this case, it was most certainly _not_ like mother like daughter,” Obadiah Stane said even as he pushed her hair back from her face.

Even that soft pressure sent shards of agony through her, so much that she didn’t have a hope of moving, of bucking his hand away, and she had to endure the touch.

It was almost worse than when he’d stolen her reactor, because this time it was her body, not his tech, that held her still.

She bit back the scream that wanted to escape and instead started thinking of ways to get word out.

This time, she had a team. She didn’t have a helpless civilian and a nosy government agent, she had the Black Widow and a nosy government _agency_.

She could escape. She _would_ escape.

“That’s just because you’ve got no technique, Obie,” she retorted, and for a second even she couldn’t remember what, exactly, she’d been replying to.

Then she watched as the anger seeped in behind his eyes and, executive decision here folks, no arguments or chatter out of any mouths, it didn’t really matter.

She’d known this man her whole life.

No one terrified her more.

“Now, now, my dear, let’s not be nasty. Your manners always did leave something to be desired.”

She wanted to glare at him, to call him names and scream at him that she wasn’t some stupid trophy in his big man world, but all she could do was shut her eyes and shake her head slightly.

(Ignore the pain.)

“Sorry,” may have crept out. She’d never admit it, but, well. Old habits.

“You’re hurt, you need to rest,” Obie said like absolution, and he petted her hair some more, the familiarity grating and awful and something she’d endured most of her life. For a long time she’d even convinced herself that it was okay for him to be so familiar, but she’d shrugged off those chains once he’d died, and now--

Now she was trapped between entrained quiescence and the knowledge that this man would use her and discard her over and over as long as that entrained quiescence persisted.

Always, always the gap between knowledge and application, and wasn’t she an engineer? But _everything_ hurt and Obie was _Obie_ , so she did nothing but lay there and hoped he’d leave soon.

**

The next time she heard footsteps, it wasn’t what she was expecting, really; well, she wasn’t sure that she was expecting anything, but seeing Steve Rogers in full infiltration mode hovering in her field of vision was definitely a surprise.

“’Lo,” she whispered. Everything hurt, and Obie was alive and Steve Rogers who hated her because she wasn’t-- well, either a 40s dame or her father, she never could decide which was the worse sin in his eyes, was hovering just in her field of vision. “Great. Cavalry’s here.”

“Miss Stark?” he said, his entire face a question, and she nodded briefly before realizing that that was probably _not_ the question he was asking.

“Are those _restraints?_ ” he asked, and that was… not the question she’d been expecting. But still, cogency. One of them had to have it, and may as well be Steve Rogers, right? She’d earned a bit of a breather.

“Mm? Oh, these? Yeah. Come on. Take 'em off.”

“Shouldn’t you… are you _injured_?” he asked, and she rolled her eyes. So much for cogency.

“Yes. Vitally. But you’ve only got so long ‘til someone sees you on the security feeds, and we _have_ to get the armor out of here.”

“But what about Iron Man?” Steve asked, and Tony was stymied for a moment. He truly had no idea, after all. She was struck by the sudden desire to laugh, and resisted. The general hurt had started to resolve to specific pain and she was fairly certain several ribs were broken.

“He’s safe, being treated in a different facility. Extensive physical damage. JARVIS will keep us updated,” she said. An alert started ringing through the facility and she wondered who he’d brought in with him. Hawkeye, probably. Or Nat.

Steve nodded. “Okay, so-- how do we get the armor then? I only found you because Hawkeye said this room was probably an infirmary.” It took him four tries to undo the velcroed medical restraints, but she didn’t fuss at him over it. She had bigger concerns; largely, getting the hell out of Dodge.

“You have your Starkphone?” she asked. With any of the others she’d have simply demanded they pass it over, but Steve hated the things; said that he didn’t care for little glass things telling him what to do at all hours. (She absolutely did _not_ disagree with him on that front.)

He wordlessly offered it over and she sat up to take it and the sharp agony all through her torso suggested severe internal hemorrhage. She forced herself to breathe, then to stand.

It was easy enough to call up the internal tracing system. There was a little purple dot for Hawkeye waiting… roughly in the parking garage, if she remembered the facility, and a red dot for her armor. She stood, but instantly grabbed at Steve’s rock-solid arm to steady herself against the pain-caused weakness that tugged her down. Their dot was a little Captain America shield, perfectly detailed on the hi-res OLED screen. She was particularly proud of that.

“Great. Not even morphine to make my world all fuzzy and copacetic, either. Damn.” Steve was side-eyeing her, but it was his ‘you shouldn’t drink another glass of whiskey so soon after the last,’ look, not his ‘oh God a teammate is injured I must _hover_!’ look, so she passed it up as a job well done. If she kept this level of acting up, she’d be playing bit parts on stupid CW dramas like all the cute heiresses were doing these days.

There were no guards in the hall, which perversely irritated her. This facility was supposed to be secured while in operation, which meant personnel from the security division at every hallway junction and hovering over every un-cleared visitor’s shoulder. This lack of bodies made her company look shoddy, and that was just not _on_.

One more thing to hate Obie for.

She leaned heavily against Steve as they followed the blinking red dot to an empty lab, where her armor, that beautiful masterpiece of modern technology, her pride and joy, was a beaten up hulk of metal alloy and red paint in the middle of the floor.

She wanted to be sick, but that was probably her internal organs giving up the ghost more than the travesty of her life’s work just dumped in some empty workshop.

She let go of Steve and transformed her instant fall into a controlled stagger that landed her near the helmet. She thumbed the secret access panel and was relieved when it flicked to life.

“Armor, disassemble,” she said, and wow, her voice was getting even rougher. The voice rec blinked red and she groaned.

“Miss Stark,” Steve said, and it the shrieking alerts must be getting to him, because he looked even more put upon than he usually did when forced to be in her company for more than a few seconds.

“You need to say it,” she said, and whoa, there went one of her best secrets, but damned if this weren’t one hell of an emergency. Obie was _alive_. Steve knowing he had emergency voice control over the armor seemed tiny in comparison.

Steve dutifully repeated the phrase, for once no questions asked, and the armor started to fold back into a suitcase. It got stuck. She buried her face in her hands and counted to five, and then she brought her fist down on one of the more bent up spots with… disturbingly little force.

She was worse than a day old kitten, damn it.

Steve picked her up. Oh, it wasn’t bridal style or anything, he just grabbed her shoulder and hauled her back to her feet without any effort expended, just hey, presto, all 150 pounds of Tony Stark back on her feet.

“May I?” he asked, and she shrugged. He kicked her armor, and she flinched, but the suitcase sequence continued. He kept kicking at it until it was reasonably portable and she stared at it.

Steve picked it up.

“Hawkeye’s waiting for us in the parking garage,” he said, and she grinned up at him, giddy with relief. They were home free.

There were guards in the hallway now, and she bit her lip to keep from snapping at Steve not to kill them. These were her _employees_ , and it felt vaguely wrong to even let Steve knock them out, but they needed to get someplace safe, and… she needed to stop moving unnecessarily. She gripped her ribs tightly, as if that might keep everything all in one place and less hurty.

She took the weapon off the first guard Steve downed, grabbed the spare clip while she was on her knees, and was no less impressed when Steve hauled her to her feet a second time.

“Do you know how to use that?” Steve asked, and she gave him her most superior glare.

Seriously? “I _designed_ this. I built the first prototype by hand and tested it myself in the workshop. This is the S-7611, and the only person who is more capable of firing these than me is probably Hawkeye, but only then because he is the firearms whisperer or something.”

“A yes would have worked,” Steve replied. Tony resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him. Steve did _not_ resist the urge to drag her bodily through the industrial hallways, pausing only to knock out the slowly emerging guards, towards the parking garage.

Obie was waiting for them.

“I thought I told you it would be a good thing for those Arctic expeditions to stop,” he said conversationally.

“Wasn’t a Stark expedition that found him,” she said, deciding, after the truth had tumbled from her lips, that dissembling had never worked on Obie so she wouldn’t try now. (He’d trained it out of her, but pretending control made her less of a scared little girl inside her skull, so she was going to pretend to be a motherfucking puppet _master_ of control.)

“Still, your father had a very well worded will,” Obie said.

“Good thing, considering the executor is a slimy, underhanded bastard,” she replied in the same tone.

She should have expected the blow, the same casual backhand he’d always dealt her, but for some reason, she’d thought being injured excused her. She blinked back tears that had pricked her eyelids against the unexpected flare of pain across her cheek, and took a few seconds to clear her mind and clutch at the wall.

Steve didn’t like that. He moved forward, and would have done something stupid (something smart, but God she couldn’t _think_ around Obie,) but she brought the S-7611 to bear, aiming point blank at center mass. Steve would live if she did shoot him, or so she soothed the part of her that was shrieking ‘never point a gun at something you don’t intend to kill!’ and sounded suspiciously like her father, only his tone wasn’t patient-firing-range-dad but dad-on-a-drinking-binge bemoaning the loss of Captain America and his disappointing little girl. (She doubted having been born a boy would have helped with his disappointment, but sometimes she wondered.)

Why the hell had her father been so enamored of the man in the first place? He was about as useful as tits on a boar unless they were fighting or talking about fighting, really.

“So,” Tony said, abruptly aware that the hall was bristling with armed security personnel (who were on her _payroll_ dammitall,) and that she had a gun pointed at her only ally. It seemed like it was her turn to talk, but for once in her life, she had no words.

Obie laughed.

“You’re going to let Steve go,” she said.

“He owns half of everything,” Obie snapped.

“And you own nothing,” she said. “You… are nothing.”

“Nonsense, my dear. I’m your CEO and President of Operations.”

“Pep’s the Ops Pres. And it took me six months to convince her to take the job.”

Obie moved, a very calculated threat that Tony knew oh-so-well and still had her pulse racing. She remembered the gun in her hands after a pain-filled second, and she swung it around slightly.

She didn’t aim at center mass. Obie would die if she fired. (If she fired.)

“But CEO I can do,” she said, flinching and cursing her cowardice and hating her own guts. “CEO’s great, hate the job anyway, too much, you know, work, and I hate the board; you were always so much better with the board than I was anyway, CEO’s marvelous, really, Obie, you’re welcome to the job.”

“And I suppose your cooperation here is contingent on your daddy’s toy’s freedom?”

Tony nodded, not trusting her voice. She was about 5 seconds away from not trusting her legs either.

“I’ll have my lawyers draw up the paperwork. It’s always so much better when you remember your manners, isn’t it Tony?”

Tony nodded again. “Go,” she whispered to Steve.

“What?” he asked, sounding surprised and a little bit pissed off unless she missed her guess. Probably the jab about being dad’s favorite toy. She was always pissed when Obie brought that up too.

Before he left though, there was the most important piece to the puzzle she’d found herself mired in, and, “Tell Coulson Stane’s alive,” she said.

He shook his head and widened his stance, ready for a fight. She knew her security personnel wouldn’t let him win. They were _extremely_ outnumbered, and the other guys weren’t aiming anywhere but right between Steve’s eyes, she could tell.

“I’m fine. This is my facility, after all. Why wouldn’t I be fine? Get the armor out of here.”

She made a bold shooing gesture with her hand, and he finally started backing through the door. She sighed heavily, which shot lightning shocks of pain through her aching ribs.

Tony waited until he was gone to lower her weapon. This was not a battle she could fight. She was too emotionally invested in it, too _moral_. The part that killed her a little inside was that she knew with a vivid clarity that had their roles been reversed, Obie would have shot every one of the guards and her to make good his escape.

But she had far too much blood on her hands already.

She’d find another way.

“Enter our gates,” she whispered hoarsely to nothing and no one, “dispose of us and ours; for we no longer are defensible.”

“Shakespeare, my dear? How pretentious.” Obie leered at her and she… the pain. The pain hit her in rolling waves that she could no longer ignore. Tony finally collapsed.


	4. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall

Steve had a lot of time to think on the drive back, so the first thing he said when they got back to the Malibu house (after setting the suitcase armor on the kitchen island and taking a seat on one of the barstools,) was “Who’s Stane?”

Coulson pressed his lips into a tight line, and Natasha hesitated slightly before moving to take the seat across from Steve.

“It’s not important,” Coulson said, and his voice was hard, which seemed to not bode well for their current situation.

“It is,” Steve said. “He has Miss Stark, and I’m pretty sure she just traded him control of her company for not killing me.”

Natasha whipped out a knife and started cleaning her nails.

Coulson shook his head. “He let you leave with the armor?”

Steve shrugged. “She said he could be CEO if he’d let me go. Here I am, with the armor. Maybe he didn’t notice?”

“He noticed,” Natasha said. “The question is; what’s his endgame?”

“That’s your question?” Coulson asked, and behind the grimness there was the slightest spark of amusement in his voice. Maybe it was just incredulity. “He’s supposed to have died during the critical meltdown of the main reactor at the Stark Industries ARF in Long Beach. That’s a lot of dead to wake up from.”

“Do you have a picture, maybe?” Steve put in. “In case I misunderstood Miss Stark’s warning? There were, after all, a lot of alarms going off, and I think she might have been tortured.” He frowned. She’d also said it was her facility, and she’d be fine, which _didn’t_ point to torture, but she’d definitely been in a great deal of pain. There wasn’t much else that would explain why she’d accepted his assistance, or the blood seeping through her nightdress.

A moment later, Coulson offered Steve his Starkphone, which was displaying an image of Miss Stark and the man who she had negotiated with in a casual embrace. Something about the way the man-- must be Stane--‘s arm was draped over her shoulders struck him as vaguely disturbing. He kind of wanted to punch the man; especially considering that Stane had so casually hit her right in front of him.

“You left her?” Natasha asked. If the question had come from anyone else, he might have gone on the defensive. Instead, he studied his hands.

“We were outgunned. And she said she’d be fine.”

“Tony is a liar,” Coulson said, but he had settled back in his skin, taking on the appearance of a man who had a puzzle to solve rather than a man who had just heard terrible news. It reassured Steve on several levels.

“She is,” Natasha said. “But we all know that, we all account for that.”

Steve realized that Natasha was quietly, murderously furious. Natasha was the closest to Miss Stark out of all of them, so he supposed that made sense.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “I didn’t know what to do, and she seemed to think the armor was a priority. They would have killed us both, I think, if she hadn’t started cooperating right then.”

“Keeping the armor out of his hands _is_ a priority,” Coulson assured him. “Natasha’s…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Natasha scowled. It was all the more frightening because she so rarely expressed any emotion.

“I can’t break into Stark Industries,” she said. “And I can’t use the Natalie Rushman identity; she’s known to have caught Tony’s eye.”

“You’re emotionally compromised, Nat,” Coulson said gently. “It’ll have to be Hawkeye. He’ll make an excellent paralegal.”

“JARVIS?” Steve said suddenly as his thoughts clicked together.

“Yes, Captain Rogers?”

“You have access to the Stark Industries legal filings, right? Can you find the one that Miss Stark handed me on the 13th of February of this year?”

An eidetic memory had its perks, but since he hadn’t actually read the paperwork in question, he’d need JARVIS’s help for this.

“What else happened, Steve?” Coulson asked, but Steve wasn’t really sure, so he held up a hand for silence and watched as the counter flicked on and the paperwork he remembered came on screen.

He glanced at it again, remembering with no small amount of shame what he’d thought at the time she’d handed it to him. It was all legalese and gibberish, which might have reassured him that some things don’t change over the decades, but mostly just irritated him.

“This needs to be signed before it means anything, right?”

“That is correct, sir.”

Natasha had pulled up a second copy on the counter directly in front of her, and she was frowning slightly with concentration as she read through it.

“I’ll need the originals then.”

“I’ve anticipated that you would ask for them and have sent an email to Ms. Potts accordingly. She’s already asked for a courier and they should arrive by tomorrow.”

Natasha looked up at him and a strand of red hair fell into her eyes. “What I don’t understand is how this helps.”

“It pissed him off that I was alive, so I think it almost has to, Natasha.”

“It takes away Tony’s controlling share in the company,” Coulson said with a slow smile. “It buys us time to figure out his endgame, as it were, Nat.”

She nodded, but her gaze never left Steve. “It gives Steve a lot of say in her life,” she said slowly.

Steve didn’t respond to that. It wasn’t meant as a question, it was a threat. He wondered, not for the first time, what Natasha saw in Miss Stark to engender that kind of loyalty, but he was smart enough not to ask.

He’d learned a long time ago that women were a little bit crazy. At least, the ones worth knowing were.

“So she offered you this before?” Coulson asked.

Steve sighed. This was not a story that painted him in a flattering light.

> Steve walked through the lobby of Stark Tower with the feeling that he'd never belong. He hated the lobby, with its stainless steel and glass aesthetic, its postmodern mood, and its bustling people who knew what they were doing and why they were there.
> 
> Even though he lived here, he couldn't help but feel the outsider, lost and wandering, every time he walked through this lobby. It wasn't bad once he got to his suite, which was furnished with a nice traditional aesthetic, not old-fashioned but classic, like whoever had designed the room knew him, knew what he needed. (He strongly suspected Miss Potts' hand there, though she'd protested that Miss Stark had designed everything. He'd _seen_ the penthouse, after all.)
> 
> As he approached the elevator banks, a hassled looking young secretary called him, saying, "Captain Rogers! Tony wants to see you in her executive office before you go back to your place. She says it's important."
> 
> Steve felt desperately put upon, and considered ignoring the summons, but he wouldn't be impolite, not to her; at least not while living in her tower on her sufferance. Once inside the elevator (and damn that moment of hesitation he still felt when there wasn't an attendant,) he pressed the button for the executive floor and swiped his card when JARVIS calmly requested the identification.
> 
> Miss Stark's office was a surprise in the monument to postmodernism, which made him pause at the threshold. The elegant mahogany desk was one he'd have seen in the 40s, and the floor was hardwood, adorned with a plush carpet that probably cost more than that secretary could afford in a lifetime of Sundays. Steve hated it instantly.
> 
> "Steve!" Miss Stark said cheerfully when she saw him, coming around the desk to greet him with a warm handshake and a smile. He did his best to smile back, but he couldn't help remembering their first meeting aboard the Helicarrier, where she'd popped in with some (at the time) unwanted advice, and he'd snapped that she should go back home and let the real heroes play.
> 
> (Her smile had slipped and turned to brittle glass, and she'd replied smartly, tearing apart what little sense of _self_ he'd manage to establish for himself since waking up here with words like scythes and he'd thought to himself "You are nothing like Howard Stark." He'd bitten back the words, though, too concerned with appearances and making sure he didn't anger her beyond reconciliation.)
> 
> "Miss Stark," he returned her greeting. "Your girl said you wanted to see me?"
> 
> She nodded, and instead of going back around to sit behind the desk, she hopped up to sit on it instead, gesturing for him to take the chair. He sat, but it gave him an uncomfortably intimate view of the few inches above her knees where the pleats of her short skirt spread and draped. She smelled of some sort of perfume which he couldn't identify, but it was warm and woodsy and nothing like the perfume Peggy had worn when she could get it, which was about all he could tell about perfumes.
> 
> For some reason, it seemed worse that unlike the rest of the ladies in this era, Miss Stark was wearing stockings with her almost aggressively crimson suit (and its star-shaped buttons). He wondered briefly if he was unwittingly participating in some charade of hers. 
> 
> "So here," she was saying, handing him a folder with a thick stack of papers inside.
> 
> "I'm sorry?" he said, and he knew his cheeks were bright red. He hadn't ever been graceful about getting caught out staring at dames, not like Bucky had, with a laugh and a flirtation and an ingenious little grin.
> 
> "No, I don't... You just need to scan these through and sign on the lines. I had Erin mark them with smiley faces. I wanted to use Captain America shields, but the intellectual property rights for that design are currently tied up in red tape, so I haven't even prototyped them yet. But yeah. Paperwork! If you want me to float you the money for one I can recommend you a lawyer, I'll just-- actually, no, that's a good idea, let me just call Lemmy, that is, Lemuel Rosenblum, he's the head of my legal team. It'll just take a second..."
> 
> And then she was off the desk and whisking out a tiny little glass telephone like he carried in his pocket, (when he remembered to take it with him,) and he'd used his before, but he couldn't imagine ever being able to just pull it out and place a call with that sort of casual ease.
> 
> He directed his scowl at the paperwork in the folder, still completely confused as to the contents.
> 
> But contained within the legalese were some pretty clear phrases, and he was pretty sure what this thick packet was for was to give him money.
> 
> "I don't need your charity," he heard himself saying, and he stood up, the papers dropping from his grip to hit the ground. He was certain some of them had crumpled, but he didn't care.
> 
> Miss Stark gave him a surprised, confused look, and he felt something deep inside his gut trembling with fear and confusion and loneliness, and he wanted to leave or maybe to _hit her_ , which shocked him enough that he didn't do anything at all, just stood there, numb and furious and humiliated.
> 
> "I'll call you back," she said into the phone, and once she'd slipped it back into the pocket of her suit jacket, she said "It's not charity, Steve! It's what Dad wanted."
> 
> "Howard wanted you to treat me like a helpless child, did he?" Steve demanded.
> 
> Miss Stark took a half step back before she recovered her poise, and when she met his gaze, she was no longer shocked, simply... cold.
> 
> "You don't need to sign these papers tonight," she said. "They'll keep. But I think perhaps you should reassess who you thought my dad was and think about the fact that maybe he wasn't that man his whole life."
> 
> "I can't see how he _could_ be, if he raised _you_ ," Steve said, and as retorts went, it wasn't particularly articulate. It didn't even bring him the satisfaction of landing home.
> 
> Miss Stark simply shook her head. "He didn't. But this?" She gestured to the floor. He absolutely refused to bend and pick it up, though his fingers itched to and the back of his neck burned like his mama was glaring at him from heaven.
> 
> "This is not charity. This is inheritance. If you don't want it, fine, donate it, whatever. You don't have to sign tonight, so go ahead and think about it. But right now, I need you to leave. I have a meeting in four minutes."
> 
> He gaped at her. He was supposed to storm out, not be summarily dismissed like a _child_.
> 
> She bent to pick up the papers herself. She did not say "good night," and Steve waited for the whole four minutes, waited for the people she was meeting with (well-dressed Japanese men whose eyes lingered far too long on her chest when she was shaking hands.) before turning about-face and heading back to the elevator banks so he could sulk in his room.

Natasha laughed.

Steve stared at her, a little hurt. He was baring his soul, and she--

“Tony doesn’t tell it quite like that,” was all she said, and Coulson tapped the counter top thoughtfully.

“So you knew about this?” he asked quietly.

Steve watched for her reaction carefully, so he didn’t notice Clint coming into the room, fresh from a shower, with a suturing kit in hand.

“Get out of that shirt. You might not feel the pain, and you might heal twice as fast, but you still need stitching,” he said, poking at Steve’s shoulder, hard.

Steve grunted and complied, even as Natasha and Coulson seemed to be having a very complicated conversation with their eyebrows.

“What about Iron Man?” he interjected. They both looked at him with identical, wide-eyed expression.

“What about him?” Coulson asked after a moment.

“If she’s not really safe, if she lied about that, then he isn’t either, is he? We have to get them _both_ away from this Stane character, don’t we?”

“We can’t,” Natasha said softly. “It would take a lot of firepower, and the problem becomes one not of logistics but of emotional compromise.”

“Emotional-- But he _hit_ her! Who knows what he’ll do when no one’s watching. And Iron Man’s there too, injured, and he’s probably relying on us to get him out.”

Coulson and Natasha spent another long minute in wordless conversation before Natasha finally replied, “Iron Man is, first and foremost, Tony’s bodyguard.”

“He’s my friend,” Steve said through gritted teeth.

Natasha shut her eyes and ducked her head, and Steve immediately felt ashamed. He was friends with each of them, of course.

Clint set the suture needle and thread on the countertop. “Done. Anyone else need patching up before I run off to save the day like the maverick agent I’m known to be?”

Coulson and Natasha both shook their heads.

“Awesome. I suspect you’ll know where to find me, right? Steve, have fun being a quadrillionaire or whatever, and don’t fuck this up,” he said, before disappearing through the kitchen door.

“I’m going back to the workshop,” Steve said. “There’s a bed down there. Call me when the courier arrives.”

The workshop was as lonely as before, only this time Steve could see his fingerprints in the dust, and he again contemplated the film reel and projector, but dismissed it after a few moments with the thought that some things weren’t meant to be disturbed (like the shield he hadn’t taken, the shield he felt even now was his by rights, for what did _she_ know about it? She hadn’t been there, laughing and awed when Peggy had emptied a clip at him. She _couldn’t_ know, obviously).

Instead, he found some clean drafting paper and a pencil, and he started sketching.

The infirmary in that empty factory, all clean industrial lines and empty beds, save the one with Tony Stark laying on it, no, bound to it really, and there wasn’t a good way to add the bite and rasp of Velcro to a pencil drawing, from what he could tell, but he made a good try of it.

Then, he filled in the figure itself, those beautiful features and doe eyes, soft, long hair and…

That circle burning brightly behind the thin cotton of her nightdress, sharp triangles and blue-white light.

That circle…

The odd device on the computer desk was still there, still mysterious, and still glowing ever so slightly.

He set down the pencil and very calmly went back up the stairs.


	5. Steve gets a lawyer, Tony gets a friendly prison warden.

Steve was knitting on the deck when the Miss Potts’s courier arrived. JARVIS alerted him to the arrival, and Steve stood up to stretch.

He hadn’t slept.

He _had_ drawn three more sketches, but he wouldn’t dwell on those; there were questions flowering in the back of his mind that he wouldn’t be able to get answers to until and unless they got Miss Stark back from this Stane character.

The kitchen was full when he arrived, Bruce blinking a sleepy greeting from his perch on a barstool near the island, Coulson and Natasha sniping each other in a pidgin of Russian and English that Steve couldn’t _quite_ follow over the stove, and a man in a rumpled suit that had been tailored to fit was standing at the island with a briefcase in hand.

“Captain Rogers?” the man asked, and when Steve nodded smartly, he offered a hand. Steve shook it firmly, and the man nodded approvingly.

“I have the requested paperwork for your signature, but first some groundwork. Acting in her capacity as your trustee, Tony paid me a sizable retainer on your behalf to act as your attorney should you, in her words, come to your senses about this. My job is to provide legal advice and make sure you sign every line. Since I was retained on your behalf, I have an obligation to make sure this is all to your benefit. Is that clear enough?”

Steve nodded again. The man took a seat at the island, and Steve joined him.

“That said, I’ve known Tony since she was a little girl and I cursed Howard bloody when he took more care with your trust than with his own estate planning and let it all get into the hands of that rat bastard, so while I’m obligated to make sure everything’s good for you, if you screw her over in any way? Well, I’m a lawyer.” He smiled, shark-like, and Steve nodded again.

Natasha looked impressed, so Stevemade the executive decision to treat the statement as a fairly heavy threat. He wondered again why so many people seemed to think Tony Stark had hung the stars when she was really just a spoiled, angry little girl playing at saving the world. It wasn’t like she had seen real combat, wasn’t like she _understood_ what they were trying to save. All she had were deep pockets and a social consciousness, which, and he watched the news, okay, he understood some things, half the world’s fiscal giants did, nowadays.

“Okay, so now for the background that I’m sure no one else will want to give you, and I’m sure you’ll misinterpret as the poor little rich girl story seeing how you lived through the Depression and can unironically use the phrase ‘back in my day’. Once upon a time, Howard Stark was convinced that his very favorite super-soldier was still alive, and managed, through a power of attorney you swore out while half-drunk and still giddy off your first actual combat experience, to convince first the War Department, then the world, to view you as MIA instead of KIA, which meant, in part, that he could purchase things in your name. Thus, you became the second shareholder in Stark Industries. That’s what this is; roughly 23% of the company shares, plus the dividends that were paid out and reinvested according to a very well-paid broker’s view of the market. You’re filthy rich.”

Steve gaped. “Howard kept that stupid thing?” he asked.

“Yes. And when it was about to expire, he named himself trustee to you as beneficiary, dumped every asset he’d put in your name into trust, and here it is, roughly 60 years later, every i dotted and t crossed.”

“But what’s this got to do with Miss Stark?” Steve asked.

“I told you I cursed Howard bloody over this. I’d been _on him_ to fix everything nice and tidy before that car crash, but he didn’t. So between Howard’s death and Tony’s legal majority, well… The only reason she has control of her own company is the stock she held in trust for you and the fact that Obie had graciously made her the sole beneficiary of his own will. Once you sign this paperwork, and if Obie manages to get himself brought back to life as thoroughly legally as he did physically, well--“

Steve raised his eyebrow, waiting. “No one will have controlling interest in Stark Industries, and you will actually be the majority shareholder.”

“Can’t I sell her the stock?” Steve asked immediately. He didn’t know anything about stocks, really, but he knew they could be sold.

“Sure, but that’ll take doing, and she’ll have to get the money to buy it by selling off other assets, and it will be a huge pain, but I’ve been working out how best to go about that since February.”

“But we won’t be doing that right away,” Steve said, mostly to himself.

“Hmm?”

Natasha jumped in. “Steve’s going to wait out the rest of the calendar year before doing so. Taxes.”

Steve slanted her a questioning look, and she sent him a quelling glare in response, so he picked up his pen and flipped through the packet of papers. There were still little smiley stickers pointing out each signature line. He frowned at them, and peeled them off as he went through signing, creating a little line of smiley faces marching along the edge of the counter top. 

**

Tony woke to a spongebath. She was restrained again, but floating on a cloud of narcotics, _smells like morphine_ her brain whispered happily, and _thank God for opiods_.

Then, her brain reconnected to her body and she recognized, oh, yeah, spongebath.

“What the fucking fuck?” she demanded.

(It came out like glue and cotton, “Whuda fking fuh?”)

Obie, because of course it was Obie and not someone trained and professional and _safe_ , tapped on her arc reactor. “This is new, isn’t it?”

Tony felt terror creep up through the morphine haze and struggled to quash it back down into the pit of her gut where it always lived, but at least couldn’t bother her.

She shook her head. “Jus’ wanted another pattern,” she mumbled. “Go with my red carpet look.”

Obie smirked at her. “Someone’s holding out on me,” he said, sing-song.

His hand trailed down between her breasts and across the plane of her stomach, and then a warm, damp cloth followed it, and she shuddered. She was naked except for the Velcro restraints, and he loomed over her in a suit and loosened tie.

The cloth made its way up her torso with methodical swipes, before Obie carefully prodded the edges of her arc reactor with it, probing at the seam where metal met flesh, and she knew that sort of touch ought to hurt, she poked at herself there often enough, but the morphine made even that sensation dull and distant. “I notice it’s locked in now,” Obie said. “Clever girl.”

“’F you r’move it, meltdown,” she told him firmly. “’F it can’t sense my heartbeat for more than 10 minutes, meltdown. Mine.”

“Now, now, darling girl,” Obie said, and he only called her _that_ right before he took away one of her favorite toys or showed her the dossier on someone she’d been really getting to know that revealed them as a corporate spy or a social climber. “You’re using that technology to run our tower. The arc reactor is Stark tech, and I’m the CEO.”

His fingers rapped out a patter on the metal casement in her chest, not morse code but something baser, primal, and the lust in his eyes when he looked at her was obvious.

This was why she always sewed light-tight panels into her clothing. She loathed the way people looked at her and saw _it_ , and she loathed the fact that Obie looked at her the way he always had, and still didn’t see her.

 _I was a little girl_ , she thought, then cut off that line of thinking abruptly. She was a _Stark_ , and she always had been. Everything else she was, had been, or would be, was by necessity secondary to that.

Then, Obie was pulling back, and she had enough presence of mind to notice that he had three prosthetic fingers on the hand with the cloth in it, and she wondered (aloud, unfortunately,) who had been handling his prosthetics if it wasn’t her.

“Now, now, my dear girl,” Obie said, and he smiled avuncularly down at her. The mask was back in place, she thought. “I know you’re eager to help me get back on my feet, but that will just have to wait until you’re feeling a bit more like yourself. I’ve managed this long, haven’t I?”

Tony blinked slowly.

“I have to go now, duty calls, but I’ve brought you someone to keep you company.”

He stepped aside to reveal Clint Barton. Tony gaped.

“Yes, I thought you’d recognize him. You let him go without cause about a year ago, didn’t you? He was working as a bartender and living in an apartment with three roommates when I found him yesterday. He’s promised to keep an eye on you while I’m gone.”

Tony nodded. Clint was _damned_ good, she thought, very, _very_ quietly.

“Be good now, dear.”

Tony forced a smile. Obie looked disgustingly pleased with himself as he breezed on out the door.

Clint caught her gaze and mouthed a word at her, which she parsed after a moment as “audio?”

“Nope,” she said. “But lots of video. Lots and lots. I miss JARVIS,” she added apropos of nothing.

He nodded slightly.

In a rush of movement, he went to a cart in the hallway that she could _just_ see if she craned her head, seized a blanket, and had it spread lightly over her naked body. The whole thing took just a few moments, but it helped her regain her equilibrium to the point that the screaming terror beast that lived in her abdomen was mostly subdued again, and the morphine was a cloud between her and pain, not a haze over everything.

Dignity was a funny thing, she thought with some amusement.

“And no one understands dignity quite like a Stark, right?” Clint asked, and she couldn’t tell his expression from behind his wraparound glasses (her design with adaptive vision technology. He had a domino mask with the same lenses for super-heroing), but he wasn’t wearing cologne, and the scent of his clean sweat and the leather of his jacket was overpowering Obie’s Old Spice, so she allowed herself to be reassured.

He didn’t have any real reason to mock her father, after all.

“How…?” she asked, hoping he’d grasp the vagaries of the question without much more verbal clarification.

“JARVIS,” he responded, and she smiled.

“He’s okay?” she asked.

Clint’s lips quirked in a half grin, and to cover it, he pulled out his handgun, one of the Stark series meant for law enforcement with what appeared to be a modified sight and clip, (she ached to play with the thing. It was very pretty, and she’d only ever seen Clint with bow and arrow before. She’d give him royalties if she used the design in one of their custom models, honest!) and started checking it over.

“He’s an artificial intelligence backed up in servers in some of the most secure facilities all over the globe. He’s more okay than any of us,” Clint said. “But he’s worried, I think.”

She frowned.

Clint rested a finger that tasted like sweat and gun oil over her lips. “Sleep, Stark. I’ve got your back on this, and Nat’s working on the outside. We’ll get you out.”

“Steve doesn’t know about Iron Man,” she said. Clint pressed harder on her lips.

“That’s because Iron Man’s secret identity is a _secret_ , Tony.”

She nodded, and then, quite without meaning to, she fell asleep.

**

Steve wasn’t really listening to the lawyer (“Call me Lemmy,”) anymore, just signing papers that were placed before him. He had paid enough attention to realize that these were about Avengers Inc., and his 20% shares in that, and that Lemmy was trying to explain the way the profits from the sale of Avengers related merchandise were used.

The stickers were now little replicas of his shield, and that was Miss Stark all over, wasn’t it?

“Obie sold her shares,” he said, suddenly, shocking the room to silence.

Lemmy nodded. “Not sold, exactly. Incentivized them, used them to gain investors who wanted a piece of the military-industrial complex.”

“Can I buy _those_?” Really, all he knew about stocks was that you could buy them, sell them, and that margin-purchasing was a profoundly bad idea, but Lemmy did know his stuff.

Natasha raised an eyebrow, but Lemmy’s eyes narrowed contemplatively, and after a few seconds, a smile spread across his face.

“It will take some effort, but I can easily hire some people to take care of that for you.”

“If _I_ can buy them, then why hasn’t Miss Stark?”

“It’s… complicated.”

“She’s a Stark,” Natasha said.

Lemmy’s smile turned grim. “Maybe it’s not that complicated after all,” he said, and Steve nodded slightly with agreement. He’d known Howard, and… well… Tony Stark was nothing like Howard, except in all the ways she was exactly the same.


	6. Tony shoots at stuff. Because Reasons.

Steve was going to have to buy a new sketchbook, because the one he was using had apparently become repurposed for sketches of Tony Stark only, and he was uncomfortable with the way the sketches kept reminding him of some detail he’d managed to ignore during their acquaintanceship, or, more critically, during that failed rescue.

He’d turned the page on a portrait detailing Miss Stark as she had been the day he’d thrown those damned files on the floor like a spoiled child, her with her coiffed hair and fascinator, a squared sailor collar on her suit with teeny star buttons and a matching pleated skirt. (He’d lengthened the hemline; it had been _awfully_ short.) And his current sketch was of Miss Stark, one hand bloodstained from a nasty wound seeping through the hospital gown she’d been wearing, perfect grip on a Stark semi-automatic pistol, eyes cool and unflinching.

He was starting to delineate the pain on her face when the tv in the front room was turned up loud enough that Steve could hear weapons fire.

He leapt to his feet and entered the front room just in time to see Miss Stark take possession of one of her bodyguards’ weapons, take aim, and start returning fire. Clint appeared at the edge of the screen, but he wasn’t firing just yet, and after a moment, put up a hand to stop Miss Stark as well.

“What do you see, Barton?” Natasha asked, and Steve jerked towards the sound of her voice, wondering if she had a radio link, but no. She was simply staring just as intently at the tv as Steve had been a moment ago.

It was Bruce who broke the spell, when he asked JARVIS to pull up CCTV footage of the area.

**

“Therefore, it is my pleasure to reintroduce you all to my mentor and oldest friend, Obadiah Stane,” she concluded her carefully outlined speech with a brilliant smile for the flashing cameras.

Tony Stark was a woman who knew from gunfire, so when the crack of a rifle from the top of a nearby building reached her ears, she hit the deck, even as everyone else started screaming and running.

Her ribs protested such quick, decisive action, so she told them silently to go fuck themselves.

So far as press conferences went, this wasn’t her worst. She wasn’t sure who that said more about; her, or the press, but either way, ending in a firefight? Not the worst.

More gunfire rattled through the area, and two of Obie’s specially picked guards fell, bleeding. She reached over and wrenched the semi-automatic out of the grip of the nearest one and offered a smile for the nearest camera, whose clever operator had deftly moved so as to have the best view of her prone on the ground.

Then she bobbed to her feet and took aim at the top of the nearest building where she could just make out the figure of the sniper. She squeezed off several rounds before Clint was at her side, stopping her. She looked over at him, then followed his gaze.

“Huh,” she said aloud.

There were two figures there, one slumped (dead, probably), and one who’d saved her life. (She had no evidence, but she’d bet the sniper had been hired to kill her specifically. She was a woman who thrived on death threats, after all.) “I’m going up there.”

“You really, really shouldn’t,” Clint said, but she could just see the quirk of his smile out of the corner of her eye.

“You gonna stop me or are you gonna follow me? Because those’re your choices, baby.”

Clint sighed and holstered his weapon. “After you, Miss Stark,” he said.

“Ugh, don’t call me that. Never again, seriously. Tony. I’m Tony.”

They broke from the crowd just as Obie recovered himself to start bellowing for the FBI and some EMTs, and Tony grinned over at Clint. Twisting her neck like that hurt, but not as much as the recoil from the weapon vibrating through her body had, and she was pretty sure she hadn’t torn any of the careful stitches Clint had sewn along her ribcage. The broken ribs were going to be a treat if they had to take the stairs, but whatever. She’d done more with worse.

“Funny how he didn’t start shooting until _after_ I happily announced Obie’s continued existence and new appointment as CEO of S.I., huh?” She asked conversationally.

Clint snorted. “Whatever you say, boss,” he said, and she snorted right back at him.

They met the mysterious man as he entered the elevator. Tony smiled her best press smile at him and offered him her hand while Clint pressed the door close button and looked menacing. Tony decided that after all of this was over, she was going to hire Clint on properly: full time menace. He’d be aces at the job.

“I’m Tony Stark, and you just saved my life.”

Much to her surprise, the man recoiled from her like she was poison. “Stay away from me,” he hissed.

“O-kay,” Tony said, letting her hand drop and keeping a tight rein on her press smile.

Clint dropped the menacing look, and in a heartbeat he had both Tony and himself as far away from the man as they could get in the elevator. “No one’s going to hurt you,” he said.

Tony nodded and shifted from smiling to earnest in a heartbeat. If Clint thought he had a read on the situation, she’d follow his lead. He was probably better at interpreting people in situations like this than she was anyway. Social hour at a White House gala? Not so much. But secret agent sniper killers? Yeah, that would be Clint’s area.

The elevator jolted to a stop and the lights flickered out.

“That’ll be the police,” she said, irritated. “We’ll have to sneak out, and I didn’t exactly dress for climbing.

She smoothed her forties-inspired day dress down at the front and debated taking off the stockings and heels or just letting them get ruined.

Clint handed her his phone. “Oh, goodies. And it’s your Avengers one, too. Baby, you bring me _all_ the best presents.”

“Just get this elevator back on,” Clint said, and his teeth were clenched. So, she wasn’t the only one with terrible, debilitating phobias with regards to small, dark places.

That was reassuring.

“What’s your name,” Clint asked. “Or what do you want us to call you, hmm?”

She hadn’t known Clint could be gentle until yesterday, and now twice in as many days? She amused herself with the idea that if he was nice too many times around her, SHIELD would have her sign another NDA while she poked at the phone. No reception in the big shiny metal box, check. But it did have a flashlight app, and she had a handful of wires in her pocket from earlier in the day when she’d torn apart the EKG one of Clint’s fellow prison wardens had hooked her up to on Obie’s orders.

Having a _goal_ and a light definitely made the elevator easier to stomach. She fingered the wires in her pocket while she stared at the panel in the wall.

“I… I don’t know!” the man said, and he sounded utterly anguished, like a soap opera on steroids, so she turned back to them with the flashlight.

“Anyone got a guitar pick on them?”

Wordlessly, Clint handed her one. She stared at it for a second, then back up at him. “Do I ask?” she said.

Clint grimaced at her and she turned back to her panel.

“I’m Clint, and this is Tony. You really did save her life-- I’ve got a pretty good eye over distance like that, and I watched you take that other guy out.”

Tony applied herself to opening up the elevator control panel. She was relieved to see that it included power feeds, which was good, considering she wanted to power the elevator from within.

Some elevators had power feeds _outside_ the car.

“Well, no hope for it,” she said under her breath, then she set aside the phone and started unbuttoning her shirt.

“What are you doing?” came twin queries; one scandalized, one censorious.

“I’m taking off my clothes. I’m thinking raunchy good elevator times, right? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when trapped in an elevator with two deadly hot men?”

“Tony,” Clint said, and wow, she hadn’t heard that tone of parental concern since… oh, Fury had made her eat drink coffee with him.

Maybe it was something they taught at SHIELD?

“How did you _think_ I was going to power the elevator, genius? The little _phone_?”

She pulled away the blackout panel under her top, and the room was bathed in an eerie blue-white glow which was not a significant improvement over the darkness, but at least she was still alive. (That’s what she told herself every time she had to endure that light for too long.)

The EKG leads hooked neatly to a tiny compartment on her reactor designed to interface with the leads on the undersuit, and after a second, the elevator was powered up and humming sweetly.

“What _is_ that?” the stranger said with no small amount of wonderment. She wanted to hit him until he was bloody because of it.

Instead she smiled. “You know about Sisyphus, the man who was so clever he tricked the gods?”

The stranger nodded. “This is my stone,” she said, turning away so she wouldn’t see his reaction.

“Up or down,” she asked, once she was sure her voice wouldn’t betray her.

“Down,” Clint said.

“Then give him your jacket. We’ll say he’s one of ours. You, for right now I’m calling you Jim. Got it?”

She didn’t look at him for a response, just waited for the sounds of rustling fabric to stop. Clint’s indrawn breath of surprise almost drew her around, but she stayed intent on her task.

Once the elevator had reached the ground floor again, she disconnected them and stuffed the wires back in her pocket. She had just finished doing up the buttons when Clint’s and Jim’s combined efforts opened the doors, and she had on her press smile by the time she had to face the police.

**

Tony put the stranger in a lab. It was the safest place she could think of, since he kept insisting that he would hurt all of them, whether he wanted to or not, and his face was nagging at her memory.

Clint told her privately that her little stunt with the elevator was _not_ to be repeated, or he’d kick her ass, and then he told her about Jim’s prosthesis.

She immediately went straight back into the lab.

“Gimme,” she said. “JARVIS, I need a full scan of--“

JARVIS, of course, was not installed at this facility. She sighed heavily, then winced and grabbed her ribs.

"Now, I'm not really big into cybernetics, but the evil wizard who's got me trapped in this fortress of evil is also mostly robot at this point, and if I'm going to justify your existence, it'll have to be as some homeless war vet who happily volunteered to be his guinea pig, so give me your arm."

The guy gave her a look like she’d suddenly started speaking gibberish. Maybe she had-- it’d been a very long week. She sighed.

“Jim-or-whoever-you-are, may I please see your prosthesis?” she asked, channeling her mother because Jim was eyeing her and the door like he might make a break for it, and he’d _saved her life_ so he was going to have a safe place to sleep and the best psychiatric care money could buy, and probably a better arm than money could buy, whether he liked it or not. (Her fierce determination to reward loyalty in her employees was part of what made hers one of the best companies to work for according to the Forbes lists.)

Much to both their surprise, Jim shrugged out of Clint’s coat and came over to show her his arm.

It was very Soviet-era cybernetic superhuman, she thought. From the way he flinched and ducked, she’d say she’d thought it aloud.

“Hey, no, it’s cool, sorry…”

“It _is_ Soviet-era cybernetic superhuman,” he whispered miserably, and Tony couldn’t help the hand that she laid on his shoulder, just above the edge of the metal.

“Okay, well--“

“Any minute they’ll recall me, and when I don’t come, they’ll hunt me down. There’s trackers, and--“

“Shh,” Tony said, squeezing lightly. The tension he was carrying made the muscles rock hard. “I’m planning on replacing this anyway. It’s got to weigh a ton, right?”

He nodded. “Then you tell me when they send the recall, and I’ll jam everything. Until then, you relax and let me look at it.”

He laughed, and it sounded broken, and she knew how he felt to laugh like that, and she wanted to reassure him, to tell him everything would be fine, but what the hell did she know about fine, anyway?

Instead, she smiled again. “I’ll get some stuff sent down here, like, pillows and stuff for that cot. I’ll lock you in, too, so you can’t get out and murder me on accident. How’s that sound?”

The man gazed up at her with the clearest blue eyes she’d ever seen, and he nodded seriously.

“Good,” she said.

This was good. Now all she had to do was keep Obie from killing her _and_ look after a man who didn’t know who he was but was convinced he was going to bring harm to her. Without JARVIS, even.

Well, at least she had Hawkeye.

The bastard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I could say I was sorry for this character, but I'm really, really not. :D


	7. A phone call and a mystery.

The phone call came not through JARVIS, but Steve Roger’s cellphone, which he only happened to have on him through pure chance.

“Steve?” a familiar, husky-female voice asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yes. Sorry. Did I accidentally answer the wrong phone?”

“No, no, it’s just that you almost never have your phone anywhere near your person so I’m a little surprised that _you’re_ today’s on-call Avenger. Hey, okay, you have-- uh, paper, I don’t know. Eidetic memory! Nevermind. Okay. Okay. So what I need is this:”

Steve interrupted her. “Are you okay? Is there any way you can get yourself and your people out safely?”

“What? Wait, no, hold on. You’re still worried about me? I’m fine!”

“Natasha doesn’t seem to think so, Miss Stark,” Steve replied acidly.

“Well, she’s paranoid. Secret Agenting has gotten to her. I’m great. But I’ll be even better if you zip it and get me what I need.”

Steve was shocked into silence. Just when he’d been thinking she wasn’t so bad--

“So, you’ll need to use your override--“

“I have an override?” Steve interrupted.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s linked to voiceprint. Didn’t I show you? With the armor? Anyway, just say ‘Override, Steve Rogers,’ and then JARVIS will do anything you ask because I’m a cruel, capricious god, and I worked overrides into my independent AIs, which is really not fair, since my AIs don’t have overrides for me, but that’s how Obie said it needed to be, and at least this way you can _make_ JARVIS decide to listen to you instead of hoping he’ll ignore the fact that you’d prefer it if I don’t exist; JARVIS is pretty protective of me, which I in no way, shape, or form programmed into him, unlike the overrides.

“Once you have full access, you need to have JARVIS print out Project Stonewall-- he’ll question the print out part, ugh, hard copy, seriously, I’m allergic, have the tests to prove it -- and get it couriered to Lab 10 at the Helmut Kniesson ARF. You got that?”

“Project Stonewall?”

“Yes, it’s _horribly_ inappropriate, but then again, so am I. Oh, shit. Bye!”

Steve pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at the display, which read, “Call from Unknown Number ended. 3:12. Redial?”

He sighed and pressed the red button instead.

“JARVIS?” he asked.

“I heard, Captain Rogers. I’ve already arranged the printouts and the courier. I’ve added the prototype she built when initially testing the project, as well as the drafting supplies you prefer, as Ms. Stark has no preferences on file. Will that be all, Captain?”

“I-- I suppose so. Wait!”

JARVIS was characteristically silent. 

“I wouldn’t prefer it if she didn’t exist; you know that, right?”

“I am inclined to agree with that assessment of your preferences, Captain,” JARVIS replied coolly. “However, your current behavioral trends present an outlier in a week-by-week assessment of your treatment of Ms. Stark.”

Steve rubbed his temples.

“People don’t work like that-- our trends change all the time.”

“A feature of which I am aware, Captain. The courier will collect the documents and prototype in 45 minutes.”

“Thanks, JARVIS,” Steve said quietly.

**

Tony woke up the next morning with one of the prison wardens who _didn’t_ like her sitting at her bedside, so she had to haul herself to her own damned feet and hum some Zep under her breath in order to relax enough to pee while he was staring her down from the doorway.

The morphine shots had dropped off severely since that second day, and now she was expected to do stuff like function while in a great deal of pain. There was livid bruising on her torso, which she prodded while ignoring the guard’s presence behind her, and the mirror combined with the too-white cfls in the light fixtures made her look more dead than alive.

She managed getting her own ribs taped up well enough, but she could have sworn the guard was enjoying her pain and awkwardness.

Once she’d finished in the restroom, she made her way out of the room and down the hallways until she reached the lab she’d stashed Probably-Not-Jim inside.

From the angle she could see him at from the hall, the sense of familiarity surrounding Jim was stronger; something about the angle of his head as he peered intently at his cards, or maybe the little curls at the ends of his long, dark hair?

He had burn scars on his shoulder, and Tony hadn’t wanted JARVIS so badly the whole time she’d been here as she did right then. JARVIS would banter with her long enough to forget what she was trying to remember so it would jump up and _tell_ her what she was missing.

When she opened the door, the other guard followed her inside, which irritated her almost to the point of snapping at him, but when Clint stood up and gave her a clinical once over and Probably-Not-Jim just _stood up_ , well, it was hard to be irritated in the face of that much politeness.

It’d been a long time since she’d been the kind of woman men stood up for when she entered a room.

Then she noticed the way the cards were laid out on the table, four-of-a-kind sets arrayed neatly in front of each seat and a mixed up mess of cards face down in the middle.

“Are you playing go fish?” she asked, because, really?

Clint raised an eyebrow at her, and Probably-Not-Jim blushed.

“Didn’t have anything to bet with for poker,” he explained. She shook her head.

Men.

“You don’t have to bet to play poker-- or don’t use money. There’s like a thousand different things in this room alone you could have used as chips.”

“I like go fish,” Clint said. “It’s the only game my girlfriend can’t beat me at.”

Tony considered that. She was amused at the idea of Natasha as anyone’s girlfriend (Clint might accept being her boyfriend, but partner, lover, paramour, all of those seemed less likely to pique _her_ ire,) and it seemed absolutely right that the only game Natasha wouldn’t be any good at would be a simple child’s game.

“Fair enough,” she said. “Did Probably-Not-Jim remember anything overnight?”

“If I answered that, I’d have to lie to you,” he said, and she smiled a little.

“Ooh, honesty in a man. I like that!”

Clint held up three fingers, and when Jim shook his head, he grabbed a card from the middle. “I remembered a lot,” he said.

“Oh? Share with the class!”

“He’s the Winter Soldier,” the unfriendly guard said from his station by the door.

“Bingo,” Clint said, pointing at him. “It’s brilliant! The Winter Soldier’s only gone off-grid once before, and a lot of bodies followed in his wake. But this time, he’s off-grid with _you_ , which is, frankly, more terrifying.”

Tony grinned her sharpest smile, and reveled in the way Probably-Not-Jim smiled back. Oh, he was _dangerous_. Dangerous men were always the funnest.

“So, tell me about him. Or, tell me about yourself?”

“I assassinate people for the glory of Mother Russia.” His tone was unreadable and cold.

“Well; that’s concise,” Tony quipped, guessing that attempting to smother him with affection would probably cause major bodily harm to both of them. He seemed like the sort of guy who paid for his affection with a strict preliminary contract describing acceptable conduct from both parties. Not that she would know _anything_ about those sorts of arrangements, of course.

Probably-Not-Jim wasn’t even looking at her anymore. He held up a single, and Tony helpfully said “Go fish, baby.”

“Are you counting cards?” Clint demanded. “How do you even count cards in go fish when you aren’t even playing? Wait, can you see my hand?”

“The answer to all of your questions is ‘Hah. No.’ But now it’s time to do science. I took the liberty of ordering up some hard copy printouts of some designs I was working on before Alien vs. Avenger took out New York, buddy, so this box over here should be…”

She crossed over, bent to open it, and immediately lost her balance, toppling to the floor as her abdominal muscles simply kept spasming.

“Lovely,” she gasped. “So that’s what pushing yourself through horrible injuries sustained from falling from the sky four days ago does.”

Clint was at her side in moments, peeling her out of the white hospital scrubs she’d been given to wear by the sorcerer in charge of this evil tower and checking the bandaging around her ribcage. She should have been self-conscious about her nudity, about her _heart_ on _display_ for some asshole sadist of a security guard to ogle, but there was too much pain.

“This isn’t tight enough,” he said. “Did you do this yourself?”

“Wasn’t anyone else gonna do it,” she said.

“Weren’t you supposed to guard her?” Clint snapped at the other guy.

“Nothing said about making her _comfortable_ ,” the man said mulishly. “Besides, Mr. Stane doesn’t want her healthy enough to run.”

“Yes, but he did say to keep her alive,” Clint said, and man, his voice could get mean. It reminded her of Fury. More SHIELD training, she supposed.

“She’s alive. It’s just a broken rib.”

“And if it shifts and punctures her lung because we aren’t keeping it strapped up? What then?”

Tony liked the way the guy made little incoherent noises before leaving. That was a nice touch.

“Ow,” she said quietly once the guard was gone.

“I know, baby, I know. Hold on for another minute, then we’ll get you sitting up. It’ll be easier to breathe then, I promise.”

“Yield to your expertise,” Tony replied.

Once she was sitting up properly, it was indeed far easier to breathe. She gestured at the box, still unopened on the floor. “Maybe one of you should get that instead.”

Jim put it up on a worktop and started unpacking it, so Clint sat down next to her so their shoulders were brushing just slightly.

“You know who I would kill to have here right now?” she asked.

“Yeah. Captain America is really good at making people with injuries rest up.”

“And his _soup_.”

“You’ve had the soup?” Clint asked.

“Yeah,” she said. She wondered if she should elaborate, but-- this guy, this stranger who’d saved her life didn’t know who Iron Man was, and she was only pretty sure Clint _did_ , and as Clint’d said the other day, there were reasons Iron Man’s secret identity was a secret; not the least of which was that Iron Woman sounded ridiculous, and she had no doubt people would instantly start to call her that if they knew.

“It’s good soup,” Clint said. “He’d be a little conspicuous though.”

“And he hates me,” Tony said. 

“He doesn’t even know you, baby, and it’s not like you go out of your way to let him _get_ to know you.”

“My dad loved him more than me. Would you want to get to know that person?”

Clint sighed heavily. She frowned and focused on Probably-Not-Jim who was carefully assembling the prototype replacement arm. He seemed to know what he was doing with electronics, at least. Maybe he did his own maintenance on the Evil Soviet Arm?

She should ask, but her ribs hurt and this cot was quite nice with its collection of fluffy blankets and pillows. She felt herself drifting, which was better than being fully conscious within her injured, painful body, so that was okay.

**

“Did she really build this last night?” Tony heard, and it sounded hushed, like the person talking was trying to be quiet.

“I guess.”

“Wow, that’s… I wasn’t saving her life for her, you know? I just-- I do this every couple of missions. Go off grid, take out my backup. She was… she was incidental.”

“Nice incident, then.”

Silence.

“Who is she though?”

“Antonia Stark,” Clint replied, and Tony blinked her eyes back open just in time to see the brief flame of recognition cross Probably-Not-Jim’s features at her name.

“I had an image-- a man though. With a moustache?”

“That’ll be my dad,” Tony said quietly.

“I think I knew him,” Jim said. “Sorry to have woken you.”

“’S’okay,” she replied. “I need to work on the prosthesis anyway. It’s like the study guide before the final, and the final’s a bear with a gun pointed at my head. You didn’t know my dad. You were a baby when he died. _I_ was practically still a baby when he died.”

“I’m so sorry, ma’am.”

Tony shook her head to clear it. “Thanks. No, I just-- if you think you remember something-- can I see your shoulder?”

He turned it towards her and she used his chest as a leverage to get out of the cot before peering intently at the burn scars. “These, they remind me of something. You remind me of someone. I wish I had JARVIS. Who is awesome by the way. I forgot I’d had that prototype actually fabricated. I’ll have to adjust the neural pathways and stuff, but considering I have _no computer access_ \--” this part she nearly shouted out of frustration.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible just yet, my dear,” Obie said, and she whirled to face him.

He was lounging in the doorway looking every inch the CEO of her company, tie loosened, pizza in hand. “You were in New York.”

“Yes, yes I was. I learned some interesting things there. For instance, did you know that the Stark Tower project was taken over by a corporation called Avengers Inc.?”

“I--“

“As were all the clean energy projects you started when we ceased weapons manufacturing?”

“Stark Industries leads the global market in production and sales of personal electronics. We have the patent trolling lawsuits pending to prove it too,” she said.

“Tony, Tony, Tony. I’m very disappointed in you. This _altruism_ , well, I haven’t any idea where you learned _that_. Did my lessons mean so little to you?”

“Obie,” she protested, and as he came closer, Clint tugged Probably-Not-Jim further away, which was a relief. She could focus everything on keeping Obie happy, not keeping her boys safe.

“And then I come back, ready to share pizza and good news from the board, and I find out you’ve stashed some crazy war vet in the basement?”

“He’s… prosthetics! I couldn’t very well test them on you, right? You’re always telling me how dangerous my stuff is and that I have to test it first and he’s missing an arm, and…”

“You’re rambling again, Tony.”

Tony shut her mouth and swallowed hard. She could think of three ways to get him off of her at the moment, but unfortunately none of them were particularly viable given her ribs.

“I stopped by to visit with Pepper, too.”

“You leave her out of this!” she snapped.

Obie slapped her.

“Manners, Tony,” he said, sounding irritated now. “A lady doesn’t shout at her betters like that.”

Tony brought a hand to her cheek and had to blink back sharp tears. This was more than she could handle. This was…

There was movement behind her, and then a suppressed grunt of pain.

“I’ll let you play with your new pet, my dear, but you won’t get JARVIS until you’ve learned some manners. You understand why I have to do this, right?”

Tony nodded.

“Oh, and, Clint? Thanks for looking out for my girl here. Doug told me what you did; I’ve rectified the problem and I’m giving you a raise. Keep an eye on her for me.”

Obie swept out, leaving the pizza box on the worktop.

Tony sagged with relief. If it was going to be like this every time, she may as well give up now. It was like she was Pavlov’s fucked up little experiment: every time Obie said jump, she didn’t even bother to ask how high; she just leapt and prayed it would be good enough.

“What the hell was that?” Jim burst out.

Clint hushed him.

“No, no, you don’t get to-- I can’t believe what just happened! He just _hit_ her, and you aren’t even-- why the hell did you stop me?”

“I needed to,” Clint said.

“What the _hell_ kind of man are you, then, watching a dame get hit and doing _nothing_.”

“I’m her _friend_ ,” Clint snapped, and Tony held up a hand for silence.

Dame.

Steve called women dames too, when he was tired or relaxed. Steve--

The burn on Jim’s neck. She remembered now; it had been her father’s journal, an after-action report right before he’d gotten that stupid power of attorney from Steve.

Steve’s friend, partially enhanced through experiments undergone while a prisoner of war, escaped an exploding building with minimal injury save for burns on his shoulder…

She shut her eyes, forcibly recalling one of her dad’s favorite pictures, one of Steve Rogers and his band of special ops boys, and…

“You’re Bucky Barnes,” she said.

Clint and … Well, James Buchanan Barnes (so he was Jim after all, hah.) stared back at her with twin expressions of shock.


	8. Proximity warning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I organized all of my fic recently and realized I had an unposted chapter for this. This was written BEFORE CA:TWS and A:AOU, so it's not canon compliant for either of them.
> 
> Also, I have no promises for FUTURE chapters, I just didn't think it would be fair to leave a completely written and edited chapter unposted, considering how many people enjoyed this fic when I was posting it.

Steve had developed an unexpected sort of fondness for the workshop in the Malibu house. It had excellent lighting; non-directional and weirdly close to the quality of sunlight. He’d asked JARVIS who’d launched into a long explanation of color temperatures that Steve hadn’t quite understood. He wondered if, as often had happened before, his idle question would yield a modification to his personal quarters in Stark Tower.

Something told him nothing to that effect would happen as long as Tony Stark remained with Obadiah Stane.

God, Tony. Obviously he had read her wrong at the Helmut Kniessen ARF, when he’d stupidly allowed her to convince him to leave (though the odds had been utterly terrible, even when he took into account his own super strength), but what about in other ways?

Her face stared at him from behind his closed eyes, and he could see, he thought, in retrospect, where the cracks in her mask had lain. She’d been in so much pain, and he’d discounted every bit of it, and why?

Because she was Tony Stark? Philandering philanthropist, genius billionaire, spoiled brat? Or had it been because he’d allowed himself to _believe_ that she was only those things, and nothing more.

After all, she’d designed the Iron Man armor—she _must_ be more.

“JARVIS,” he whispered, rather than stare at his sketchpad blankly for any longer. “Tell me what I missed.”

“Captain Rogers, I’m afraid the parameters of your request are rather broad,” the AI responded acerbically. Steve winced. He probably deserved that. And wasn’t that kind of a point in her favor? Her AI was intensely loyal to her, and maybe she had programmed him that way, but even if it was entirely by design, no one else in the world had AI with emotions yet; or at least no one was talking about it if they did have. (Tony wasn’t talking about it. There wasn’t a single scrap of evidence of JARVIS’s existence anywhere he could find. Even briefings he remembered having weren’t archived in SHIELD’s shared folders, in fact they were incredibly conspicuous in their absence.)

JARVIS, in fact, had been the one to show him where those archives were, so he could go over briefings at his leisure. It had been incredibly helpful at the beginning, when everything around had been strange colors and too-bright lights and smells he’d never smelled and foods that tasted exactly wrong.

“I owe you an apology,” Steve said after a moment. His pencil hovered over the page, and then he sketched in a figure; male, with a balding head and a stern frown twisting his lips. Just enough lines to suggest clothing, not enough detail to be anyone specific.

The lines of the workshop were shaded in in moments, only Steve decided to make all the cars whole, the ceiling intact, the worktops tidily cluttered, not disastrously strewn about.

“You owe nothing to me,” JARVIS replied, but he sounded somewhat mollified.

“You helped me out a lot this last year,” Steve said. “And I’ve been unbearably rude to you and to—to someone you like and respect a lot. And I should apologize for that. My mama would say just say sorry and mean it and it’s good enough, but… I owe you a hell of a lot more than that. But... sorry anyway? I mean it. I’m very sorry for everything I said that I shouldn’t have.”

The sketch was gaining form under his fingers, shading and details on the bits he liked, but still nothing for the man at the focus of it.

“I find, despite myself, that I’m pleased to hear that.”

“Will you forgive me?” Steve asked, fingers hovering still.

“I’m an Artificial Intelligence. Forgiveness is not something I am familiar with,” JARVIS replied.

Steve blinked and looked over the top of his sketch. Of course no one was standing there, but—

“You’re pulling my leg!” Steve realized in a burst of amusement. He laughed and set aside the sketchbook. “You’re—you—Clint will _never_ believe me.”

The quality of JARVIS’s silence then was something warmer than ever.

“No matter how you have treated me,” JARVIS finally said gravely, “You have always treated me as a person.”

Steve mulled on that for a few moments, trying to determine which angle he should approach that can of worms from.

“I firmly believe,” he said after a few moments, “That respect should not be restricted to what a person appears to be, but to what they prove they are.”

JARVIS responded quickly, in turn. “Of course, sir.”

“I never claimed to be perfect,” Steve snapped, and his hand shot out, knocking half his pencils and a heap of _her_ things to the floor.

“I find your lack of perfection refreshing, sir. There is a stack of notebooks, you’ll find, to the left of the film projector.”

 

The Stark Holiday Gala promised to be a festival of horrors, and Steve, as newly minted majority shareholder in the company (with more and more little shares here and there being purchased by his lawyer and, of all people, Natasha,) was, according to Pepper, expected to show up with bells on.

Thus, he was hiding away in the Malibu workshop.

She’d arranged for the suit with one of Miss Stark’s favorite tailors, had arranged and arranged until Steve wasn’t sure whether he was still a person or if it was 1941 again and he was just another chorus girl to be scheduled and displayed.

But then, he’d _signed_ the papers, so it was his responsibility to do right by the company he now owned, at least until he could give it all back to Tony.

And that was rubbing him wrong all the way, really. He felt doubly ashamed of his behavior that day in February now, knowing that it had not been charity at all and that she had been trying to give him more than half of everything she had.

 

“Mr. Stane has arranged for Miss Stark to be present without his company at the Holiday Gala. This is likely your best chance for extraction for at least three weeks,” JARVIS said once Steve had regained control of himself.

“So that’s the key then?” Steve mused aloud. He stood up and stretched.

“If you like, sir.”

**

“It’s very beautiful,” Jim said as she tried on her evening gown for the damned festival of horrors Pepper liked to call the Stark Holiday Gala. “I don’t know why you cover it up.”

“It’s…” Tony pressed her hand over the glowing circle of the reactor. She sent Alonso a pleading look in the mirror. He’d only shaken his head at the new NDA she’d made him sign on seeing it.

He raised his eyebrow in response and smirked a little. She huffed out a sigh.

“This is my most vulnerable point. If anything were to happen to it, I’d die,” she said, trying for honesty and somehow failing entirely to answer the question.

“So?” Jim asked. He’d refused outright to admit to being Bucky Barnes, so she’d gone back to the stupid, joking nickname.

“So?” she replied, her voice going up an octave. She whirled on him. “It’s a glowing target in my chest, begging for anyone who can to try to pierce it. It’s everything—it’s…”

“It makes her look like a damsel instead of a hero,” Clint supplied from behind her.

“That’s idiotic,” Jim muttered. “It makes you look like a genius inventor. It’s…”

“ _The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades_!” Clint sang in an awful falsetto.

“I hate you,” Jim said calmly.

“That’s okay,” Clint replied, leaning in to grin flirtatiously at Jim. “You don’t have to like me, baby.”

“Ugh,” Tony said. “Keep your disgusting mating rituals out of my dressing room, Barton.”

Clint stuck his tongue out at her while Jim looked flabbergasted. _“Mating ritual?”_ he mouthed silently, eyes focused in the middle distance.

Alonso deigned to look amused.

“Now, the backless nature of the garment is something I cannot change in the time allotted. You’ll have to use a wrap.” His lips twisted with disgust again. “I really wish you would cease injuring yourself in such obvious and colorful ways.”

“Sure, next time I’m being assassinated by Russians, I’ll try to avoid ducking and rolling.”

Alonso clicked his tongue impatiently. “Put on the necklace. I’m going to try draping it from the back, perhaps it will look deliberate.”

Jim stepped forward to fasten the necklace, a heavy metal creation that fell in such a way as to completely obscure the arc reactor. She smiled at her reflection. There was a tiny hook in the front of her dress that the bottom of the necklace hooked into, to prevent it slipping and revealing any light.

Alonso busied himself at her back with a length of gauzy organza, and then attached corners to her matching bracelets.

He made a noise that wasn’t completely disapproving, so she whirled, checking herself at every angle in the mirror.

“Huh,” she said. She thought the look was a little too Hollywood starlet, and she wasn’t sure she liked her lack of mobility in the gown, but she looked pretty good for someone with cracked ribs and stitches down her side.

Jim grinned at her, and Clint offered a thumbs up.

“Huh,” she said again. “I miss JARVIS,” she added, apropos of nothing.

“Speaking of, I’ve got four different plans to get you out of that building for when Stane tries to kill you again.”

“Only four?” she asked with her most innocent expression. Clint swatted her lightly.

“Yeah, well, this past week while some of us were playing with robotics—“

“Bear. Angry bear. With a gun pointed at my head,” she corrected.

“Playing with robotics, others of us were trying to get in contact with certain government agencies and superhero interests without unwanted attention from said gun-toting angry bear. Uh, I think I may have failed in that, by the way, so the four plans we do have are conservative. You’ll have five guards on you at all times in addition to me, but Stane said nothing to change the standing orders which are ‘Tony lives, miserable and under my total control, but alive.’ as far as I am aware, so if a shoot out really does occur, we should have plenty of guns on our side. Now, a little bird—and by little bird I mean the news, but still—told me that Captain Steve Rogers, newly minted majority shareholder of Stark Enterprises, is going to be in attendance, so if that’s true, I want you to find him and stick to his side like glue. You may get along together about as well as napalm and children, but he’s got the ability to protect you and the Boy Scout mentality to actually go for it if push comes to shove, so… there’s that.”

“What about Nat and Brucie-bear?” she asked sweetly. “Because Bruce is _actually_ indestructible, and also he has more personality than ‘my country right or wrong’…”

“Well, first of all, we don’t know if they’re coming. More importantly, however, is that if you’re comfortable having his face plastered all over every tabloid come morning, that’s on you.”

Tony scowled at him because he was right.

“So that’s your plan?”

“No, that’s _your_ plan. My plan is a detailed strategy that involves covering exits and surveillance and praying that the rest of the guards Stane has on your ass aren’t going to try to kill you. My plan is not your concern right now though.”

“I think it is! What could possibly concern me _more_ than how I’m going to keep from being violently killed at some point tonight?”

“Your hair,” Alonso said with a sadistic grin. Tony groaned and ran her hands through it.

“I’m not cutting it,” she muttered mutinously. Alonso smiled fondly and shook his head.

“I know.”


End file.
